Our Version Of Events
by EmAnnie01
Summary: After a certain incident, Harry feels he has no option but to leave Nikki behind and move to New York to start again, blaming himself. Nikki, however, holds herself to blame for driving him away. But whose interpretation of events is the closest to the truth? Can Harry and Nikki come to terms with what really happened and forgive themselves enough for them to be together? Multichap
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

_'Didn't see it coming,_

_No kind of warning,_

_I can't work out what I've done wrong.'_

_Suitcase, Emeli Sandé_

She cried the night he told her.

She's a little ashamed to admit to it, if truth be told; she wouldn't ever confess to it, not to anyone and especially never to him. How could she possibly even begin to admit the true extent to which he had torn her world apart, shaken her very foundations? How could she possibly expose just how badly his departure had affected her, a change within her which had seemed to occur, irreversibly, the night he first informed her of his plans? She couldn't, she just couldn't, no question about it. No one would ever be permitted to know, she would make certain of that by any means necessary.

The truth of it is that it scares her a little, even now, in the aftermath. It scared her then and it scares her now to think of just how dependent upon him she's become over the past eight years, because now that he's gone, to admit to that dependence would be to admit to the fact that there is now a large, empty hole in her life where he used to be.

The problem was this: she simply didn't have the faintest idea as to how to go about filling that hole. But that wasn't really an issue, she had long-since first concluded, because she didn't want to try and fill it, not now, not ever. This new void in her life where he had once been but no longer was would remain a void forever, and she didn't care if it destroyed her very soul before too long. She knew enough about life and enough about human nature and enough about love after so many years to know that even attempting to replace him would be pointless.

At what point over the past eight years had he become her everything; the only person who truly knew her very soul inside out? She had allowed him into her life in the capacity of best friend a long time ago, but the difference there was that it had been a perfectly conscious decision she had made. But she couldn't, however, remember ever allowing herself to think of him as something more, giving her heart permission to fall so hopelessly in love with him. Maybe because deep down she had known all along that it would end like this? That they could never possibly last, the two of them, that they would almost certainly fizzle out and fade into nothingness before they had even begun, both becoming just a little broken hearted in the process? Maybe it had been some form of subconscious defence mechanism; her denial, that was, her denial even to herself of having fallen in love with her best friend? Maybe a part of her had known all along that their love was doomed to failure. Maybe.

But could it even be referred to as love? That was the question which haunted her now, in the aftermath of it all. She knew that she had loved him with all of her heart, of course, but had he ever truly loved her back?

For years she had thought he did, hoped he did, even if she never dared admit it. It was more of a subconscious thing, something which she had only come to realise now, once it was all over, now that she was well and truly alone. She had loved him so desperately that perhaps she had not been able to see things clearly, true, but there must have been at least the essence of something there to fuel her fantasies, lead her on... mustn't there? Surely she hadn't desired him so very badly that she had seen something in his actions which had never really been there at all, not even a little?

She didn't think that was the case. She didn't think she had been that desperate, that naive. She would have known if she had been, that was what she kept telling herself, now he was gone.

But that was just it. If there really had been something there between them, even the faintest beginnings of love in his heart for her, then why had he left her? She didn't buy his excuses of being sick of the mundane nature of London, his claims of wanting something vibrant and new to brighten up his days, not in the slightest. He had loved London, she knew he had. Up until that night he had never mentioned even contemplating moving on, not even to a new job still in or close to the city. He had certainly never mentioned a desire to travel, not unless his suggesting in passing that they went on holiday together the following summer, just the two of them. Not unless that could be considered to count.

No, there had been nothing. Nothing to suggest he might have been planning this, nothing at all. And that only made her all the more convinced that the reason behind his sudden departure from her life, from England altogether, was the events of that night.

She had tried so hard to forget all about that night, put it to rest. She had tried so, so desperately hard, she really had, but she had failed so miserably almost at once that she very quickly gave up for good. It was the one thing in her life she so badly wanted, needed, to be able to forget all about and yet the only thing she seemed completely incapable of pushing out of her mind.

Only he could do this to her. Only he could wrap himself around her very soul and proceed to stubbornly refuse to release his hold upon her, even after he was gone and she was all alone once more.

She wanted to hate him for it. She _should_ hate him for it, she knew that; if anyone else had even dared attempt to hurt her in the way he had, she would have hated them for it.

But she couldn't hate him.

She simply didn't have it in her.

Because no matter what he had done, no matter how much hurt and upset he had left in his wake, one simple fact remained.

She loved him.

Unconditionally, she loved him.

And that made hating him next to impossible.

She didn't know what to do now. Her inability to even resent him just a little for what he had done to her, or to move on and forget all about him had pinned her into a corner, and she knew it only too well.

There was no chance of future happiness, of finding someone to settle down with, she knew that. People could waste their energy telling her that her Mr Right was out there somewhere waiting to make her happy and content forever all they liked, but she knew better than to believe them.

Maybe some of them realised, maybe they didn't. But she had already found her Mr Right, the only man who could make her happy and content forever. She had met him a long time ago, spent the last eight years as his best friend, hoping and wishing and praying that one day, one day soon, he would see what had been right under his nose the entire time and want to make a go of things with her. But he never had.

It wasn't as if he didn't want a family, someone to settle down with. If that was the case, even merely a possibility, then perhaps this rejection in love would have been a little easier to cope with, to accept, just a little. But it wasn't a possibility, not at all. She was only too aware of that.

She knew he wanted to find someone to settle down and grow old with because he had told her as much. 'There's so much I want out of life but half the time I just don't know how to get it', that was what he had said. He did want to settle down, that was what those words implied to her at the time, still did now.

He wanted to settle down.

He just had no particular desire to do it with her.

That was the part of it all which hurt the most.

She would survive, she knew that much. She would survive, broken, rejected and unwanted for the rest of her life, but she would survive all the same.

But she would never stop thinking about him. Even if she wanted to she would never succeed in making herself stop. Each and every night before she slept she would paint her wishes on a starlit sky, pray to whoever was up there to bring him back to her, give her back the happiness she so desperately desired.

At first, after he had gone, it had comforted her a little to tell herself that he was looking up at the very same sky as her, that however far apart they were, at least they were still under the same sky.

Then one night, roughly a week after he had left her for good, she had remembered that thanks to the time difference, they would never be under the same starlit sky again.

And from that moment on, she was completely and utterly inconsolable.

He was gone from her, most likely forever.

And nothing she did could ever bring him back.

* * *

_So I've finally reached the point at which I'm happy to start uploading this: this is the multichapter I mentioned months ago- I know, I know, it's been a while! I'm a decent way into it now so hopefully I'll be able to update regularly, though updates will be dependent on reviews ;) _

_I'll upload the first proper chapter if I get a few reviews for this :) Credit is due to Emeli Sande, whose album 'Our Version Of Events' gave me an idea as to why Harry might leave Nikki behind for America and what it might take to ressolve the situation. Also I huge thank you is due to all the wonderful people who reviewed my first three oneshots and gave me the confidence to begin uploading this: Ela plume-en-sucre, wordsunleashed, emmaj1996, cariad1987, catty, tigpop, socialitegirl, Lizziginne, Weshclaire, Scarletpoppy, xlaramiex, mari27990, greylostwho, charlotte88, Issy, KiwiSWfan, Nikki Cunningham (extra bonus points to you because I think you picked up on every single Sparks Fly lyric in Reconciliation :) ) tigersbride, Freya82 and Dinabar- I honestly can't tell you all how much I appreciate it. _

_Hope you all enjoy this, especially given we'll soon be facing a lack of both Harry AND Silent Witness on our screens :( please do leave a review, even if it's just a couple of words, and I'll continue uploading if people seem to be enjoying it :) _

_Emxx_


	2. Chapter 1

**PART I**

**LONDON**

**Chapter One**

_'I hope that the world stops raining, _

_Stops turning its back on the young,_

_See, nobody here is blameless,_

_I hope that we can fix all that we have done.'_

_Hope_

She shivered a little as she stepped out of the warmth of her car and into the brisk chill of a cold September night, hail stones and heavy rain pounding on her back as she ran, almost sprinted so desperate was she to avoid getting soaked to the skin, around the back of her vehicle to open up the boot and pull out a SOCO suit from her on-call bag. Shuddering, she smoothed the suit over her clothes and picked up her case, pausing for a moment to remove her ID card and car keys from her handbag before setting out into the night.

It was just gone four am on an autumnal Saturday morning, and in all honesty she had been hoping and praying for a lie-in, especially given the fact that this was her first week at work in more than three months and it had left her shattered. But no such luck. She had been dragged from her bed just under an hour ago now; this had left her incredibly irritated for someone who had never actually been asleep in the first place. She had barely slept at all in the past three months, not since the accident. Trying and failing to force her brain to switch off and allow her body to rest had become so much of a chore ever since then that if truth be told, she had more or less given up trying.

Except it wasn't just since the accident that sleeping had become a battle; she knew that in her heart of hearts. The issue dated back a little further than that, to what she now referred to as 'the incident'- only to herself, of course. That night.

But she wasn't thinking about that, she reminded herself firmly. She had promised herself at the start of the week, upon going back to work at long last, that she wasn't going to allow herself to think about that night. It was over, all over, over and done with, no going back. Replaying it over and over again in her mind was never going to change anything. No matter how desperately she craved the ability, she couldn't turn the clock back. Even if she could, what good would it do? She wanted to be able to mend her mistake, put things back, undo her terrible, terrible action which had proved to have the most awful of consequences, led to the situation in which she found herself today.

But what was the point in being able to turn back the clock if she still did not know what her terrible mistake had been?

She had thought about it. God only knew how much thought she had given it, mulling it over and over in her mind until the whole thing threatened to send her mad if she didn't stop sooner or later. Still she was no closer to an answer than she had been before, let alone to a solution.

And that, she reminded herself now, following the street-lamp-lit pathway out of the car park, was precisely why she was no longer allowing herself to think about it. Not at work, at least. It was a distraction, that was the problem, a distraction waiting to happen because as soon as she allowed it to enter her thoughts it would stubbornly refuse to leave again. It would sap up her energy, her concentration, leaving her completely incapable of thinking of anything else at all.

And that was why, at least at work, she had to push all thoughts of that night firmly out of her mind.

She wasn't entirely sure where she was going. All she had been told by the disgruntled police officer she had received a telephone call from almost an hour previously had been an address, a post code; one she had frantically scribbled down in the notebook she kept on a table beside her mobile phone for occasions such as this. She hadn't yet the faintest idea what she was dealing with, either. All she had was the postcode and her ID card; the rest would undoubtedly become clear once she had been admitted to the scene.

She followed the police crime scene tape in search of where she was needed, fighting the temptation to rub wearily at her eyes. It was still so dark, being only the early hours of the morning, and so getting her bearings proved itself to be a rather difficult task.

But it was easy enough to pick out a few basic features. She was on some kind of housing estate; North London, if she recalled the address and postcode she had been given earlier over the phone correctly. Although they were blocks of flats rather than houses, apartments perhaps, judging by the height of the buildings towering over her, casting long, intimidating shadows in the darkness.

Was it just the rain and the dark which was causing the whole place to feel so undesirable to her, so grim? She hoped so. She was tired; so tired, and she was praying for an easy scene tonight of all nights. She wanted something simple, a straight-forward suicide, maybe. Anything which involved minimum effort on her part at the actual crime scene itself was fine by her. If it had to be complicated, she desperately wanted the complicated part to be the post mortem rather than the scene.

That way, she could go home and attempt to get some much-needed rest before she had to drag herself back into work to tackle it.

It wasn't that she didn't enjoy her job. She loved it, always had, right from her very first day. It was all she really had, her work, the only thing in her life she had to fill her time nowadays. Over the last three months she hadn't even had that as something to occupy herself with, not since the accident which had seen her signed off for the foreseeable future.

She hadn't expected to miss it quite as much as she had. Most people would welcome a break of a quarter of a year from work, especially given the unreasonable hours she found herself having to work in her profession, not to mention the insufferable police detectives she often ended up being forced to tolerate. But she had, she had missed it.

She had missed having a purpose.

It was starting to become rather obvious as to where the crime scene was, judging by the large white tent just visible now in the distance, the crowd she could just about make out milling around it. The tent was positioned just left of the entrance to the block of flats directly ahead of her, a little in front of the block. A fall, a suicide? That was the first thought which sprang to mind; the closer she got, the more apparent it became that the crime scene tent was in the perfect position to be concealing the body of someone who had thrown themselves from the roof of the building, landed on the pavement outside. It was far too soon to tell of course, especially having not even laid eyes on the body yet, been given any details whatsoever, but right now, suicide seemed the most likely explanation.

This was to be her first proper case since the accident. She had been in work all week, yes, but she had been kept away from any cases of her own to deal with, deliberately, she suspected, to ease her back into it slowly. Instead, she had been left with nothing to do other than completing paperwork relating to cases which had begun and ended whilst she had been away on sick leave after the accident, a task which had threatened to bore her to death as she struggled to work her way through. She had resigned herself to the fact that she might well be kept away from anything vaguely resembling an actual case of her own for quite a while yet.

And so it had been something of a surprise when she had received the phone call from the police calling her out to this scene roughly an hour ago now.

She didn't feel quite prepared for this. Stupid, she knew; she was good at her job, she had to keep reminding herself of that. It was only natural to feel somewhat nervous about being thrown in the deep end after three months of sick leave, but she was back in action now and she was ready, despite the butterflies in her stomach, the increasing sense of dread the closer she became to the crime scene tent.

It was going to be fine. Yes, she might be a little shaky to start with, but she would get back into the swing of it in no time. It was like learning to ride a bike, learning to swim; no matter how long one left it for when they returned to the activity it still felt instinctive, natural as anything. The first few minutes might feel a little strange, but another ten after that and she would feel her old self again, fully prepared to take on the world. It would be absolutely fine.

"ID?" The voice of a rather bored-sounding police officer pulled her back from her thoughts. It had been a while since she had last done this but she had been right; already the memories were flooding back. She reached into her pocket on autopilot, pulling out her ID card and holding it out to the officer.

"Dr Nikki Alexander," she said, voice clear as a bell, suddenly feeling more at home than she had in months. "Home Office Pathologist."

* * *

The police officer paused for a moment to glance at her ID card, eyes straining a little in the darkness before nodding, then stepping to one side and gesturing to Nikki to pass through into the crime scene tent, out of the cold and rain and safely undercover. She smiled at him gratefully, shivering a little in as the cold icy winds of the early hours of the morning intensified once more.

Nikki found herself taking an abnormally deep breath, attempting to compose herself before stepping through into the crime scene tent, confronting whatever it was waiting for her inside. Suddenly, with hardly any warning at all, a peculiar mixture of excitement and worry and nervousness and just a hint of dread came flooding into her heart all at once.

It had all be different before, somehow; before she had found herself stood right in the entrance to the crime scene tent. It had been so long since Nikki had last been out on call that up until now, excitement had been the only real emotion she had experienced: excitement at the thought of having a purpose again, excitement in anticipation of feeling alive again in a way that she hadn't since the accident three months previously. Not that simply returning to work could ever possibly fix the aching within her heart of late, her desperate need, her greatest desire which could now never be fulfilled.

Nikki knew that really, deep down at least. But still, she had allowed herself to hope the maybe, just maybe, coming back to work properly, coming out on call might do something to help make her feel at least a little back to normal.

The trouble was that she had clung to that hope. That hope had been one of very few things which had assisted her in pulling through this far in the aftermath of the accident, which made this crime scene, this case, all the more critical in terms of her mental state, her recovery. Nikki was only too aware of that, and in all honesty this realisation was causing her to feel rather afraid as she stood there in the entrance of the crime scene tent, mustering the strength and the courage to step inside.

What on earth she was going to do if her plan failed to work and she felt just as lifeless and unneeded after tonight's crime scene as she had been ever since the incident and the accident which followed, Nikki wasn't entirely sure. It was a rather frightening prospect, she quickly came to realise, and not one it was going to do her any good to dwell upon. And so Nikki Alexander took a deep, slightly shaky breath, pushed all thoughts of the hellish nightmare of the last three months as far to the back of her mind as she physically could (which, these days, was not very far at all) and stepped right into the shelter of the crime scene tent.

Almost immediately, she was confronted by a tall, well-built man with a greying moustache, dressed in a SOCO suit, police-issue notebook clutched tightly in one hand.

"Are you the pathologist?" Was the first question he posed to her.

Nikki nodded, holding out her hand for the man before her to shake. "Dr Nikki Alexander, I'm attached to the Home Office. And you must be the DI…?"

"That's right. DI Robert Thorn, I don't believe we've met?"

Nikki shook her head. "No, I don't think so…"

"…I believe I've worked with a colleague of yours before though," DI Thorn continued. "Dr Harry Cunningham, he's at the Lyell Centre too, isn't he?"

He threw her completely with that statement. Purely and simply because she hadn't been expecting it, that was what Nikki told herself. Although that in itself was incredibly naïve of her, she realised now with a sigh, cursing herself as she struggled to pull herself together after the shock of hearing _that name_ just when her guard had been down, leaving her completely unprepared…

Could she really have been as stupid to have convinced herself she wasn't going to be hearing his name at work from now on? Of course she would be, just because the person in question was no longer employed at the Lyell Centre, that by no means meant he was erased from history as far as the world of pathology and police was concerned. He might be gone, long gone in fact, but traces of him lingered everywhere, Nikki was going to have to get used to that. Somehow, she was going to have to learn to live with it. Although god only knew how.

"No, n-n-, I mean…" Nikki stammered, having seemingly lost the ability to string a coherent sentence together. "Yes, he… he did… up until recently. He was… he accepted a contract from New York University three months ago, left almost immediately- he took up a professorship there, you see, he needed to be there for the start of the semester. So… so he's gone," she finished, her voice still just as shaky as it had been when she first begun to explain. How had she managed to fall apart quite so quickly? That had to be a new record for her, even on top of all the other rather impressive ones she had managed to set herself after the accident.

"Oh… oh, I see," DI Thorn managed, clearly rather taken aback at Nikki's near-falling to pieces at the mere mention of Dr Harry Cunningham's name. He frowned for a moment, silent, before seemingly deciding that the best course of action would be to pretend their somewhat shaky discussion of New York University and new appointments stateside had never happened and move onto the case in hand.

"Jane Doe- so far, anyway," the DI changed the subject quickly, stepping to one side to finally allow Nikki a first glimpse of the body in question, her first proper case of her own in three long months. "Looks as though she fell from the roof of the apartment block; I'm thinking suicide based on the evidence so far. What do you make of it?"

Nikki crouched down slowly, carefully beside the corpse, dropping her case down beside her and pulling on a pair of latex gloves. The body in front of her appeared to be that of a young woman, sprawled on her side in an awkward, rather twisted position, looking rather as though she had indeed fallen from the rooftop just a couple of metres to the right as the detective had already speculated. Nikki frowned slightly, leaning over the body for a better look.

"She looks young, early to mid-twenties is my guess," she began, getting right back into her stride with surprising ease. "Judging by the facial features I would guess she could be Eastern European in origin, though that's just a possibility. How far have you got in terms of trying to get an ID?"

"Not very far, not yet," DI Thorn admitted, almost a little sheepishly, Nikki realised with amusement. Did he find her a little too composed and professional, a little too intimidating, perhaps? It wasn't the portrayal of herself she had been aiming for exactly, though Nikki was more than willing to run with it. She found herself in the mess she was in now because she had once come across too open, too naïve, she had concluded, and she would do anything to ensure she never found herself in that position again. Yes… intimidating, that must be it. Intimidating could work.

But then she remembered her near-falling apart at the mere mention of Dr Harry Cunningham's name, and all of a sudden she wasn't so sure that she had managed to come across as composed and intimidating after all.

"We'll be going door-to-door tomorrow, seeing if we can find someone who knew her," the DI continued. "Assuming it is a suicide, it seems logical that she lived in the apartment building; someone here must have known her. So you think she's Eastern European?"

"Could be," Nikki replied, refusing to give too much away for the moment. She was still a little nervous that she might have lost her touch in those long three months away from work and didn't want to commit herself to any particular opinion too soon if at all avoidable. "That's merely an inference; the only way of being sure is by formally identifying her."

"Of course," DI Thorn agreed. "What do you think though, of the scene? Suicide?"

"Possible…" Nikki began; she was still in the process of carrying out a thorough initial examination of the Jane Doe's external appearance. She had forgotten just how awkward this whole affair was, trying to conduct a careful examination of a body in the dark, crime scene illuminated only by a dim, artificial light, half blocked by a swarm of police officers flooding the crime scene tent. She knew what she was looking for; at least, she knew roughly what. There were a number of possibilities, a mental list inside her head, and all Nikki had to do now was to work her way through it, ascertain which of her list of possibilities applied in this instance…

And then she found it.

Nikki leant further across the body on the floor of the tent, checking one last time just to be certain.

"Can you step to your left for a moment, please?" she asked, turning to look over her shoulder at DI Thorn and the forensic photographer now stood beside him. "You're blocking the light; I want to get a closer look."

"Of course. Why?" asked DI Thorn, an almost child-like curiosity in his tone. "Have you found something?"

"Quite possibly," Nikki replied, frowning momentarily as she continued to examine the body, taking one last check, just to be sure. "There," she finished at last, gesturing almost triumphantly to the forensic photographer to move in and capture the injury she had discovered on the Jane Doe's body. "Minor abrasions to the shoulders."

"And?"

"And they're significant because…?"

"Because the positioning of the abrasions is consistent with the Jane Doe being grabbed by the shoulders, possibly shaken," Nikki explained, shivering violently as the opening flap of the crime scene tent was pulled open and a gust of cold wind hit her hard, chilling her to the bone.

"So you think there was someone else involved?"

"Could well have been. Have you checked the roof for any signs of a struggle? Assuming it's the roof you think she descended from, that is?"

"The roof's being checked as we speak, no obvious signs of a struggle so far, although it's not the best of conditions for a thorough search," DI Thorn admitted. "Progress is bound to be slower than normal, though we should hear something soon."

Nikki simply nodded, her eyes never leaving the body in front of her. She was finding it increasingly difficult to focus on the case, to keep her mind clear, empty of thoughts of _him_. She had to concentrate, to force herself to by any means possible.

"There's not really anything more I can do here, the next step will be to complete the post mortem," she explained. "I'll arrange to have the body taken back to the Lyell Centre. Will you be attending the PM?"

"If that's alright with you."

"Does nine am tomorrow work for you?"

"Perfect, the sooner the better. I'll see you there, Dr Alexander. Goodnight."

"Goodnight," Nikki replied, and with that she bent to pick up her case and headed towards the tent entrance, pausing to brace herself for a moment before mustering the courage to make a run for it, right into the storm. She kept running, going through the motions of movement, almost automatic in her actions, until she reached her car, unlocking it as she ran and hauling herself into the drivers' seat, slamming the door and shutting out the rain. She turned around to throw her case onto the back seat, pulling down the hood of her SOCO suit and turning on the headlights.

It was only as her key turned in the ignition that it all finally became too much for her, and before she had even made it out of the car park and onto the main road in the direction of the Thomas Lyell Centre, Nikki Alexander had burst into hopeless, uncontrollable tears of mourning for all she had lost.

Dr Harry Cunningham.

* * *

_First proper chapter, hope it was OK. Thank you so, so much to my wonderful first reviewers: Dinabar, KiwiSWfan, greylostwho and Megannnn123, your encouragement was hugely appreciated and I'm so glad you're enjoying this so far. As you may have gathered, there is going to be a proper ongoing case as an element of the plot, though I'm using the case as a plot device here in order to achieve something else... that's all I'm saying for now :P The details of both the accident and the incident wil be revealed in time, promise. I'm going to keep you hanging for a bit longer on that one yet ;) _

_As ever, reviews would be hugely appreciated, however long or short, the more I get the sooner I'll upload the next chapter :) I'd love to know what you're thinking so far._

_Emxx_

_PS. as with the prologue, the lyrics at the beginning of the chapter are from Emeli Sande's Our Version of Events album, can you detect a theme here? :P It only seems right given her album was the inspiration for this storyline._


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

_'What changed so quickly?_

_Answer me!_

_If you must kill me, at least, please, tell me why.'_

_Suitcase_

Nikki Alexander headed straight for the Thomas Lyell Centre after leaving the crime scene, regardless of the fact that it was not yet gone six on a Saturday morning. There was no point going home, she told herself; she had told DI Thorn she would be conducting the post mortem on the Jane Doe from that night at nine am, and even if she did bother venturing home for a couple of hours it wasn't as if she was actually going to succeed in getting some sleep.

No, she decided, it would be a far better use of her time to simply head straight for the Lyell Centre. She would be several hours early for the PM, admittedly. But the advantage to this newly-formed plan was that she would have time to freshen herself up, check her emails, buy herself some breakfast from the university canteen on the off-chance she felt like eating something, not to mention remind herself what exactly a post mortem involved. She had helped out her boss, Leo Dalton, a couple of times during this first week back at work since the accident, though this would be Nikki's first case all to herself in those three long months. That was something which caused just a small degree of terror to build inside her.

If she was completely honest with herself, a part of Nikki knew she had deliberately arranged to carry out the Jane Doe post mortem at nine am on a Saturday because she knew the chances of Leo being present at the time were relatively slim. He and his girlfriend of three years, Janet, had separated a couple of months before the accident, and Leo had spent rather a lot of his weekends in those first couple of months as a single man once more in work, as though without Janet he didn't quite know what do to with himself. That had begun to trail off in the couple of weeks before the accident, however, and by now Nikki was almost completely certain Leo had rediscovered something of a life for himself away from the world of work. A part of her envied him; here she was, three months on from the incident which had shaken her completely, irreversibly changed her life for the worse forevermore, and still she was finding it every bit as impossible to even begin to move on as she had before.

Nikki placed her coat over the back of the desk chair facing away from the bookshelves in the shared office area; she had avoided sitting at her own place all week, rearranging her photo frames and postit note pads in amongst the array of paraphernalia still cluttering the desktop, untouched, from the days when it had been Dr Harry Cunningham's workspace. The clicking of her heels echoed down the vacant corridors of the Lyell Centre as she made her way to the female toilets, splashing cold water onto her face upon her arrival until she succeeded in shocking just a little life and alertness back into her. She reapplied her makeup, composed herself, taking one last long, critical look in the bathroom mirror before disappearing back along the corridor.

Back in her office, she boiled the kettle in the corner, warming her hands with a mug of steaming coffee as she sat at the desk which was not her own, turning on the computer. She still had a good half an hour before she was expecting DI Thorn to arrive for the Post Mortem, Nikki realised, frowning for a moment in thought before logging into her work email account. She was at something of a loose end, nothing to do, and was becoming increasingly aware that perhaps remaining sat at this particular desk in the Lyell Centre, all alone and her mind unoccupied was not the best of ideas.

In that moment of brief panic, scrambling in the beginnings of the darkest depths of despair and loneliness in her mind and desperate for something to do to pull her out without a moment's hesitation, checking her work emails had seemed like a reasonable idea.

Though by the time she had typed in her password- no going back- Nikki had already realised that perhaps it hadn't been quite such a good idea after all.

She couldn't escape it, what she was fighting so hopelessly to avoid. He was everywhere; reminders of him were everywhere, no matter what she did, where she went, however she attempted to flee. He was like her shadow, her reflection, his memory bound to her by a sheer and unbeatable force of nature. She didn't have a hope of breaking free; trapped like a caged bird, wings spread as if to fly but nowhere to go but around and around in circles behind cold metal bars. This, it would seem, was her new reality.

Nikki closed her eyes for a moment as she waited for her outlook to open, almost unable to force herself to open them again just a few brief seconds later. She knew full well what she would find in her email inbox and yet still there was a foolish trace of hope in her heart, one which she knew would be shattered into a thousand tiny pieces like a crystal chandelier falling from a great height onto a cold stone floor. An awareness of the inevitable did nothing to prevent her heart from attempting to fool itself time and time again.

Breathe, she reminded herself. Just breathe. Don't expect something you know you can't have; don't allow yourself to expect anything at all. You're only setting yourself up for a horrible disappointment if you go into this with anything in the way of expectations.

The mere fact that something as mundane as checking her emails had become such a source of heartbreak seemed only to confirm just how ridiculous this whole unhappy situation was.

It was quite possibly several minutes later that Nikki finally mustered the courage to open her eyes.

Two new messages, both concerning some samples she had sent off to toxicology for analysis earlier in the week.

Both messages she needed, but neither the one she wanted so badly.

Wasn't that just the very epitome of her problems?

It took Nikki all of ten minutes to respond to the emails and print out the toxicology results sheets she needed, and the moment her task was complete she found herself at a loose end once again. Still she had far too much time on her hands before she was expecting DI Thorn for the post mortem of the girl from the night's crime scene, far too much time to work herself up into a quite frankly ridiculous state all over again.

Far too much time in which to imagine a scenario she knew full well would never come true… _the man to whom this desk had once belonged waltzing into the office, laughter echoing ethereally in the corridor behind him… taking one look across the room at her sat at his desk, diligently working away and doing her level best not to give him the impression that his mere presence in the room was distracting her from her report, though of course it was… spinning her desk chair around in one brisk movement and grabbing hold of her arms, pulling her up and out of the chair, hands resting intimately on her shoulders as he took several paces backwards, pushing her back with him… the warmth of the contact as his hands rested over hers, once he had succeeded in pushing her down into the chair at her own desk and telling her with mock firmness that this was her workspace and the other side was his, end of discussion… the tinkling tones of his laugh as she told him not a chance and made to stand up only to be pushed right back down again, the essence of something a little more flirtatious than normal in his movements as they leaned in ever closer to one another, leaned in to…_

Though that would never turn to reality, their reality, this scene she conjured in her head as her mind raced faster and faster, as out of control as a runaway train hurtling towards a break in the track. Parts of it had once been a reality, a long time ago, but Nikki's already vivid imagination had become so overactive since then that it was becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain exactly where that rather crucial boundary line between reality and fantasy lay.

Nikki had come to the conclusion, however, that the location of that once crucial boundary line was no longer particularly relevant.

Not given the fact that the chances of her and Harry Cunningham ever crossing paths again were so slim they were hardly worth wasting time and effort pondering. Nikki didn't particularly want to put some kind of statistic on the issue; under normal circumstances she was rather numerical in terms of her thinking, but her heart was already fragile after being broken so completely three long months ago and the pain of knowing her Harry was gone from her forever was more than enough. The last thing she needed was a statistic in the aggressive, taunting form of a multiple digit number to hit it home to her harder still and shatter her heart to pieces all over again.

Still sat alone in the empty office with nothing to distract her, Nikki's next actions were perhaps somewhat inevitable. Before she had a chance to regain some self-control and some general common sense, she had begun composing a new email, not one but two email addresses filled into the box at the top. Perhaps if she sent the same message to both his home account and his new work address, he might find it a little harder to ignore her quite so vigilantly.

For the briefest and most optimistic of moments, it completely slipped Nikki's mind that this tactic had failed her several times before since Harry Cunningham's departure for Manhattan three months earlier.

_Dear Harry,_ she typed, her mind willing her to stop but her heart so intent on trying one more time that rational thought didn't stand a chance.

_I don't know if you got my other messages- I've been trying to get in touch with you for a while now, since you left actually, but I haven't heard anything from you yet and I'm worried that perhaps you didn't get my messages. I don't want you to think I'm ignoring you, that just because you've moved halfway across the world, practically, I don't still want to keep in touch. Because I do, I really do. I miss you, it's rather quiet without you here, but I'm sure you're having a fantastic time out there in New York._

_How are you finding it all? Settled in yet? Leo said he thought you'd found an apartment of your own now but he seemed a little vague. I hope the weather's better out there than it is here at the moment, this last summer's been rather pathetic. Not that you want to hear about the weather, I know… _Nikki read back through that last couple of sentences and hit the backspace key irritably; she sounded ridiculous, twittering on about the weather, trying to pretend to Harry in an email he would most likely never read that his absence from her life wasn't affecting her at all, not the slightest bit.

If she left it as it was, her true feelings were so transparent that she might as well have climbed aboard the next plan to New York, hunted him down and crawled around his new, clinical science room in a Manhattan university pathology department, begging and pleading for him to come home to her. She wouldn't give Harry Cunningham that satisfaction, Nikki was determined; she was stronger than that.

She was strong enough that she didn't need him anymore, her Harry, the one who had always been there to hold her together, no matter what over the past seven years. She was strong. She had come out of the other end of the dark, dark tunnel of her accident three months ago so strong that she didn't need anyone to hold her together anymore, no one at all and certainly not Harry Cunningham.

At least, that was what Nikki told herself.

She only wished it were the truth.

_I miss you_, Nikki wrote to replace her mindless waffling about the inevitable disappointment that had been the British summer. _It's not the same here without you, at work, I mean. I can tell Leo feels the same way I do, even though he'd never admit it. Don't worry though, we're coping perfectly fine- just temps so far but we're coping just fine with the workload, and if nothing else it's resolved the finance issues. It's just very quiet. I take it back about the jokes, they really were rather brilliant. I miss them._

_Please Harry, just pick up the phone and tell me you're alright? My number's still the same, you know you can call whenever, I'll always answer. Well, unless I'm up to my elbows in a Post Mortem, of course, but even then the moment I got out of the cutting room and checked my messages you know I'd ring you back straight away. I just want to hear your voice again, to know you're settling in well and you're happy, is that really too much to ask for? Please?_

_Love, Nikki xx_

Nikki pressed the 'send' button before allowing herself the chance to read back over what she had written and make good use of the 'delete' option lurking above the backspace, before closing down her email account and flouncing out of the room with a swish of her hair and a click of her heels along the corridor towards the entrance to the Lyell Centre.

She had a Post Mortem to complete and a DI arriving to observe any minute, and she was determined to come across as calm, controlled, professional Dr Alexander rather than the heartbroken, love-struck teenage-like character of her present alter ego.

* * *

_Apologies for the delay, I thought I was being so clever in planning to dedicate Tuesday evening to this and rather stupidly forgot I'd signed up for an evening lecture that night- bad planning I know! I'll try and be faster in updating next time, provided you review :P _

_Thank you so, so much to Freya82, Dinabar and KiwiSWfan for your reviews and encouragement, I'm so glad you're enjoying it. Anyone else? I'd love to know your thoughts so far and reviews would make me very, very happy, not to mention bring about a new chapter much quicker- I know there are more of you reading, go on :P Just so I know you're not reading to laugh at me? _

_Em xx_


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